The last four weeks or so I have been trying to completely get rid of our school room in the loft and move it to one large bookshelf in our kitchen. Here is a picture of the mostly completed project.
Four weeks to move a bookshelf!? NO, in my defense, this wasn't just a matter of moving a bookshelf. We've been traveling a lot lately and Joey has been too busy to help. This bookshelf was originally in our master bedroom holding all of our "grown up books" (no school stuff.) I first had to move our shelves that were screwed into the wall of our schoolroom into our closet. Sounds easy enough but the shelves needed three inches sawed off to be able to fit in the closet and the brackets (or whatever they are called that hold up the shelf) had to be moved over to line up with the studs in the wall. The "grown up books" went in the closet and now I am still trying to get our school stuff in the kitchen.
Okay, so maybe it still sounds like it should have just taken a day, but to me it was a big deal and my house has been a disorganized mess with no where to do school for a while, so I am excited to get myself back together.
Before I started homeschooling I thought we needed way more things than it turns out we do. I thought we needed a whole room just for school. As it turned out, Sylvia (yes, everything is her fault around here) would constantly drag her toys into the schoolroom making a big mess every day. I thought we needed our dry erase board. The kids think it is kind of fun to do their math on the board once in a while, but it pretty much goes unused AND Sylvia always takes the lids off of the markers and they get dried out (once again, her fault.)
So here is the most embarrassing thing that I thought we needed, while we were sorting through our books last night Joey found a large 3 ringed binder and said, "What is this?!" Before I started homeschooling I had put tabs in this folder for all of the subjects I would teach, all of my poster and reward chart ideas, lists of what daily order our subjects would be in and how much time a day we would spend doing math, reading, etc. EVEN what time of day we would start school.
Now I am not making fun of anyone being super organized and super on a schedule for homeschooling (okay, maybe I am just a little) but if that is the way you and your kids work then that's what works. I am just making fun of myself for trying to make homeschooling like public school and for trying to put us on such a rigid schedule when flexibility is one great reason to homeschool.
